I wrestle with guilt, as you know. Also, anxiety. It’s a fun combination, guilt and anxiety. I have a lot of experience with both.

But whereas when I was working from home my guilt and anxiety tended toward the mild, ‘shouldn’t I do more volunteering at my daughter’s school; I mean, isn’t that why moms work at home? So that they can do things like spend more time with their kids?’ and ‘why do I never get out of these yoga pants?’ variety, now that I’m working outside of the home my guilt and anxiety are tending toward the more dramatic ‘OH GOD I AM NOT THERE FOR MY CHILDREN, LIKE, EVER‘ variety. Which, I know. It’s like I look for things to worry over and feel guilt about. You can roll your eyes at me. I roll my eyes at me.

Anyway. I’m feeling more guilty this week, because her birthday is coming up and I have no idea how to deal with that, what with an apartment full of boxes and a calendar that is wildly out of control and the fact that I have no idea what one does for birthdays in New York City when one can’t host a party at one’s home. And with more guilt comes more anxiety, and with more guilt and anxiety comes more of an attachment to Ativan, which brings with it more guilt, whence more anxiety, and a kind of ouroborosian cycle ensues, etc, etc, etc.

So I failed utterly in my efforts to transform Emilia into a crime-fighting strawberry with royal lineage, in part because I just couldn't figure it out (some of you had very good suggestions involving...

Of all the types of mother that I imagined I’d be – when, that is I did imagine being a mother, which was not all that often – I never imagined that I’d be an absentee mother.

I imagined that I’d work, of course – staying at home was nothing that I ever aspired to, which is why it was so surprising when I ended up doing exactly that, for a time – and I imagined that I’d travel and I imagined that I would, broadly speaking, have a life outside of motherhood. That was, in fact, a condition that I imposed on my future motherhood: I would be more than ‘just’ a mother. I would do things other than ‘mother.’ But even given the conditions and parameters that I placed upon my future motherhood, I always assumed that wherever I was as a mother, there I’d be. Putting my kids to bed and getting them dressed in the morning and hugging them and kissing them as often as I could. You know, mothering.

Which is what I did, mostly, for the first few years of my motherhood. I worked some, I stayed at home some, I worked from home some… but regardless of what I was doing, I was always there.